This repository includes a list of "evergreen skills" that should serve as a fair assessment of skilled software developers / engineers.

The purpose of this work is to serve as an alternative resource for conducting hiring interviews of software developers / engineers. This document focuses on software development best practices, cross-framework principles and other portable skills; instead of the usual focus on trends and/or specific knowledge of short-lived frameworks, which tend to quickly become outdated and often don't reflect the real value software developers / engineers bring to the organization.

This repository is a derivative work of the following article: "What Makes a Great Software Engineer".

This is a work in progress. Important knowledge might be missing, existing bullets can probably be improved and better grouping strategies could be found. For those reasons, any contributions (i.e. PRs) are welcome. Please feel free to propose changes following the contributing guideline.

• Core skills
  • Communication
  • Teamwork
  • Technical collaboration
• Innovation & (self-)management skills
  • Development process
  • Problem solving skills
  • Mindset
• Technical skills
  • General technical knowledge
    • Principles
    • Data Structures
    • Clean Code
    • Collaboration and SCM
    • DevOps practices
  • Field-specific technical knowledge
    • Front-end development
    • Back-end development
    • Architecture & infrastructure
    • Security
    • Scaling & optimization
    • Concurrency

• Follow e-mail best practices (some examples)
• Follow chat best practices (some Slack examples)
• Minimize interruptions (some reasons)
• Be polite

• Keep low egos
• Be an active listener
• Be a good mentor
• Share knowledge
• Engage in constructive decisions

• Pull Request Best Practices
• Focus on the relevant pieces when performing code-reviews
• Pair programming best practices

• Comfortable with iterative and incremental development
• Self-organizing capability
• Avoid creating false expectations
• Focus on priorities and business value

• 5 Whys

• Don't fear change
• Dare to fail
• Be a life-long learner
• Be rational: question decisions, "let the facts do the talking"

• OOP
• SOLID, GRASP
• Functional programming (pure function, recursion,...)

• Basic structures (basic types, array, matrix, object...)
• Cache / memoization
• Hash codes, tokens, encondings (e.g. Base64)

• Self-explainatory code
• Use good naming (for files, variables, classes, functions...)
• Avoid long functions and classes ()
• Extract complex boolean conditions into functions
• Use lightway documentation instead of inline-comments
• Semantic versioning

• CVS / SCM knowledge
• Why is versioning important
• Commits best practices (atomic commits, good descriptions...)
• Feature branches / feature toggles
• Trunk-based development
• Dependency management

• Build automation
• Write automated tests
• Differences between unit, integration and system tests
• Test pyramid
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery vs Deployment

• DOM (definition, understanding, virtual DOM...)
• Responsive design (purpose, advantages, progresive enhancement...)
• API standards: REST / SOAP
• State management (associated problems, stateless approach...)
• MVC and derivatives
• Websockets

• Relational databases (how do they work, basic artifacts...)
• Batch processes / Cron Jobs
• Database design
• ORM
• Session handling
• Error Handling, Auditing and Logging

• Externalized Configuration
• Infrastructure as code
• Microservices
• Virtual machines vs Containers
• Master-slave pattern
• Client-server pattern
• IAAS, PAAS, SASS

• Public-key cryptosystems (e.g. RSA)
• Principle of least privilege
• DoS / DDoS
• SQL injection
• Man-in-the-middle attack
• XSS and CSRF

• Load balancing
• Redundancy
• Latency
• Lazy loading

• Race condition
• Deadlock
• Mutual exlusion

This work is released under the terms specified in this license file, based on MIT License.